Here’s the blurp from the opening of the handbook explaining the light and purpose of our work:

ASL is not just for Deaf People anymore. American Sign Language is actually a sophisticated communication meme with hundreds of applications for other disabilities that many overlook. We will provide footpaths for fresh discovery of interactive cross-disability communication. We are not teaching Baby Signs here. We are teaching ASL for those with Other Disabilities.

This is also a serious, scholarly, book with hard foundations in American Sign Language grammar, glossing and syntax — the teaching will also be fun and fresh and delightful.

While this book will be appropriate and reachable for every ASL learner, our top goal is serving the advanced, “ASL Level 5” professional and also mature signers like certified interpreters, other ASL instructors and ASL teaching programs as well as the Deaf and Other Disabled communities.

Over 85% of internet searches on our online multimedia teaching properties have some form of “ASL Level 5” as keywords searching for link results. We consider that empirical and quantitative proof that the phrase “ASL Level 5” proves a want for this book and that is the push that inspired us over the edge into this publication.

For over a decade, we have been working on an answer to that timely question — “Where is ASL Level 5?” — and the most fine-grained result are now in this 30,000 word handbook.